Light a Candle, Talk About Them, Take the Kids to Hot Topic — TTFA Premium

Do you want to stop feeling guilty that life hasn't turned out like you thought it should? My name is Kate Bowler, and when I was 35, my life came apart unexpectedly. I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. I was a new mom, a professor, and imagined I had finally gotten the life I wanted. Since then, I've heard from thousands of people who want a better language and a spiritual community when we need each other most. Listen to everything happens, wherever you get your podcasts. I have a podcast suggestion for you. It's called a slight change of plans. It is hosted by my friend, the behavioral scientist Maya Shunker, who's named the best show of the year by Apple in 2021. And it features the personal stories of people whose lives have been upended by a big change. Surviving disaster, heartbreak, loss, and more. And also, conversations with scientists about how even small changes can make a big difference in our brains and our lives. I have also been on it. My episode was called When Surviving is Enough. We also dropped it in this feed so you might have heard the show, and I bet you already like it. Their new season features conversations about the science of things like meditation and self-compassion and stories about navigating grief, living on borrowed time after a terminal diagnosis, and learning to argue better. You can find a slight change of plans wherever you get podcasts. Hello, Terribals. If you have been around for the past couple years, you know that terrible thanks for asking Premium, TTFA Premium, is our paid subscription platform where we post ad-free content, bonus episodes, etc, etc. Being an independent production means that there is not a big company behind us. It means that we are supported by the ads that we can drum up. Thank you to our sponsors. And we are also supported by our listeners, supported by you. If you want to offer any financial support to our show, we welcome you. We welcome you to do that. There is a link in our show notes and you can always go to ttfa.org slash premium to sign up. This episode that you are about to hear aired just for our premium subscribers, it's basically a sample of what else you can get if you sign up for TTFA Premium. So here you go. I'm Nora McInerney and hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Terribals. Thanks for asking. That is just for you, our TTFA Premium subscribers. I get this question fairly frequently in a variety of places. People ask me this on my social media. They will send emails about this. We've gotten a few voicemails about this, especially when a loss is fresh. People will ask me and I am getting to the question here. How do you maintain a relationship with someone you love who has died? What does that relationship look like after the person is dead? And I can only speak, as always, from the narrow band of my own human experience. And everyone of us is different. All of our relationships are different. The way that we grieve is different. So I actually took this mailbag question and turned it over to you guys because I was so interested in knowing how other people do this. My husband, Aaron, and I do still call him my husband, even though I am remarried to my current husband named Matthew. My husband Aaron died in 2014. We are approaching the nine-year anniversary. This fall, which seems truly impossible. Time is so, so strange. I believe that nine years have passed almost since November 2014. But to know that, to know it, know it, know it, to realize it, to think about really what that means is quite another. And I do still have a relationship with Aaron. I still consider him my husband. He will always be the father of my son Ralph, the son that we had together. And Aaron has a place still in our family and he has a place in our home that I share with all of our children in this home where Matthew's parents come for dinner, and Aaron's mother comes for dinner. And more than once, our entire families have been together. Also, I'm recording this in the office and the window is open because it's a beautiful day. And you might hear birds singing, which is one of my favorite sounds. But Aaron has a place in our family. He has a place in our home. We have his photo hanging in our living room. It's a huge, beautiful portrait that photographer, a very talented photographer named Kelly Gritsmacher took when she was putting together an art exhibit. She was taking photos of mothers. And it was a beautiful photo shot on film. And it was me and Aaron in one of the places we lived together. And Ralph is a baby and he moved when the photo is being taken. So he's sort of this blur. And Aaron and I are laying on our couch and the light is pouring into that beautiful living room. And it was in a show and Aaron bought it. So it's professionally framed and it's beautiful. And it's this moment in time from 10 years ago now. And I have that in our living room. I have pictures of Aaron's grandfather, a giant photo of him in the 70s or 80s holding a giant fish. He caught in Mexico that was framed and then Aaron's grandpa's house. And then Aaron took it when his grandpa died. Now I have it and I still have it. Ralph is a living reminder of his father. But we also say Aaron's name. I think of Aaron every day. I know Ralph thinks about Aaron every day. And almost every day, there's something that makes me think of him. A funny story, a song that comes on the radio. His records are mixed with my records. And when Matthew and I got together and moved in together and got married, we all mixed our records together. But I can tell you which ones are Aaron's and which ones are Matthews, even though now we have a lot of doubles. I will say that Aaron is so present in our lives that the child that I had with Matthew more than once has told me that actually, just like Ralph, Aaron is his dad too. So I will say sometimes, or people say, oh my gosh, Ralph looks so much like Aaron and Q, our youngest will say, well, don't I too? I do. I do too. And Ralph will say, well, no, he's my dad and Q will say, no, he's my dad too. He was my dad. And then, you know, he died. And then mom met this guy pointing at his actual biological father. So even a child who was born after Aaron died knows who he is, has his own relationship with him. We've always said, I think Aaron's your very godfather. And he, I guess, just her father and believes, depending on the day that Aaron is also his father. We have a lot of Aaron's things still around. I'm looking at the wall where my books are. And one of his Spiderman figurines is on my bookshelf. His high school ID is framed in a tiny little photo frame from when he was a freshman in high school. Ian and Sophie, who are our older kids, they're Matthew's biological children. They have some of Aaron's art on their own walls. Aaron was a prolific graphic designer and made a lot of interesting concert posters. And some of them are hanging in Sophie's room. And Ian had asked on his 20th birthday, I think, to go through Aaron's t-shirt collection and take a few shirts. So he has some of his shirts. And I think that is really cool. Days can be really important after somebody dies. I used to think that I had to have something planned for the death of her. And I really have never found something that fits. I've never found something that feels like the right thing to do. And so every year, I kind of do something different. But the one consistent thing is that I block that day. And I have no expectations for myself on that day or for other people on that day. The first year I took Ralph to Los Angeles. I traveled there because my friend had a house and he was not going to be there. He was traveling because it was Thanksgiving time. And I thought, Ralph and I are skipping that. We're not doing that. And we didn't. We just hung out in LA, just the two of us. And I've done something different every year. I've gone on hikes. I've just driven around. I've gone to a movie. I've spent the day in bed. And I think really lowering your expectations for yourself on incredibly emotionally charged days or potentially emotional days. If you can, is a kindness that you should give yourself. Obviously, that's not possible for everybody. A lot of us just have to get up and go to work no matter how we feel. But I know for myself and for a lot of other people also, sometimes the anticipation of that day is harder than the day itself. So in the weeks leading up to that death of nursery, I will be really emotional and I might even be crabby or mean. And I hate that about myself and kind of feel it coming. But then by the death of nursery, it's usually sort of past. It's just kind of like the anticipation. The day that makes me feel the most connected to Aaron is his birthday. Aaron was a birthday person. He loved celebrating his birthday. Starting in high school, he actually decided that one day was not enough. And he would have an Aaron Fest, which was a several day celebration of himself. And he would go up to his grandfather, the aforementioned grandfather had some land on the Rum River in Minnesota. He called it a ranch. It was like a little farmhouse on land that easily and often flooded. But there was land and Aaron and his high school friends would party for days and days and days. Aaron was born at the end of August. So it's hot even in Minnesota. It's kind of a perfect time to party, honestly, kind of a perfect time to party. And they would go tubing down the river and drink and have fires. And it really, I've seen photos and it looked very wild and something I would not be allowed to go to. But in his 20s, it continued and it grew into this thing where Aaron would invite people from literally all parts of his life. There are people who kind of keep their work friends separate from their high school friends or their college friends or their family or their cousins. Aaron wasn't like that. He would invite anyone he never met to Aaron Fest and they would invite people. And it was like the more the merrier. And I went the summer after we got together and was like, holy crap, I cannot handle this. One, I'm just not a tent kind of gal. Two, I could not drink enough. I mean, trust me, I tried, but I was like, this is just, at one point, I just went into the tent and I read a book, which was not something that people did. But the point is, birthdays were important to Aaron. He was also really good at celebrating other people's birthdays. So on his birthday, we have an abbreviated PG Aaron Fest where the kids in my life, Nieces, nephews, the children I have, they all get something from me and Aaron, something stupid, something their parents don't want them to have or wouldn't buy them, something they absolutely do not need. I'm buying it for you, buddy. And everybody knows that we do things that Aaron like to do. So we will go to Taco Bell. We will get a Baja Blast, which I don't think came out during his lifetime, but he would have really liked he loved Mountain Dew. If you want to play video games, we'll play video games. This past year, a Marvel movie came out on his birthday or around his birthday. And so we saw a Marvel movie. He loved Marvel, not DC. And we just do the things that I think you would want to do this past year. We also went to a mall. We found the, I think, only remaining hot topic in the Phoenix area. That was one of his favorite stores. And I just bought the kids a bunch of stuff at Hot Topic. And that always makes me feel good. Like Aaron Fest really makes me feel good. And I do miss him, but it's also a celebration of what his life was, not just his death. And I think when we think about our relationships with head people, the most important thing to think of is the life that they had and what that life meant to us and the ways we can stay connected to what they brought to our life. So all that to say, here are some voicemails from listeners about how they keep relationships with their dead loved ones. All right. So that was a preview of this TTFA Premium episode. You can get the entire thing and more, all this and more. If you subscribe to TTFA Premium, the way you do that is by going to TTFA.org slash premium. It's a couple bucks a month. It's a way to financially support our show. See you there.